French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Kim, Cacaphonies
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
An article discussing this book can be found in Acta Fabula (March 2023, vol. 24, no. 3):
“Where it stinks of shit, it stinks of being”, by Michel Renaud.
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Cacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile.
Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences.
Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life.
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Annabel L. Kim is associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions.
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Contents
Introduction: We Have Always Been Fecal
Part I. Necessary Shit
1. Céline: Shit on the Installment Plan
2. Beckett: Shit for Brains
Part II. Shitty Ideas
3. Fecal Freedom: Sartre and Genet’s ))< >((
4. To Wipe the Other: Duras’s and Gary’s Fecal Care Ethics
Part III. Political Shit
5. Anne Garréta’s Ultimate Weapon
6. Daniel Pennac’s Excremental Poetics: Literature for All
Conclusion: Caca Commun-ism
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index.
By examining works from prominent twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Romain Gary, Anne Garréta, and Daniel Pennac, Annabel L. Kim offers a compelling intervention in literary studies. Rather than treating literature through sanitizing abstractions, this study foregrounds the corporeal reality of excrement. In doing so, it questions traditional boundaries of the French canon and reevaluates how bodily elements intersect with aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions of writing, bridging literary theory with cultural critique.
This book will prove particularly valuable for scholars, students, and researchers of modern French literature, literary theory, and cultural studies who are interested in the material conditions of texts. It addresses central questions regarding how canonical writers negotiate national identity, democratic aspirations, and universalism through taboo subjects. Readers seeking fresh perspectives on canonical figures and contemporary authors alike will find this rigorous academic study an illuminating resource for rethinking the relationship between literature and the physical body.